Metta World Peace Quotes

I grew up in the Lower East Side of New York.

My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.

I grew up on 135th Street. I grew up on the poor side of New York. I grew up in Harlem.

I live in Brooklyn.

I grew up in the Bronx, but in Riverdale - not exactly an area of New York that's known for being rough and tumble.

My earliest recollections are of the teeming East Side where I was born. This Hester Street and its surrounding streets were the most densely populated of any city on Earth; and looking back at it, I realize what I owe to its unique and crowded humanity.

I grew up in the Bronx.

I appreciate the city of New York just embracing me, and Brooklyn in general.

I used to build lofts in SoHo back when there was nothing there. I had a stoop on West Broadway between Prince and Spring. My partner and I would sit there, eat dinner, and watch the world go by.

Urban America is like a foreign country in a sense.

I grew up in an inner city neighborhood called the Benson Hurst section of Brooklyn, which was a very embracing, warm, family-type neighborhood.

I think the Lower East Side inspires me. That whole neighborhood, a lot of the people that I worked with, seeing what we've gone through in life, being given an opportunity to understand who I am; my identity, my culture, and my roots.

That's such a great thing about New York, after growing up in a place and being there for twenty plus years, there's still a whole island to discover.

I grew up in Harlem, a block away from what was then the most crowded block in New York City, according to the 1950 census. Something like ten thousand people lived in one city block.

In the beginning, New York and I had kind of a love-hate relationship. It seemed so abrasive compared to Europe. But the transformation here in recent years is really something. I don't think I would have seen as much change if I'd lived in any other city in the world.

But I can tell you that the New York that I see now is not the New York that we grew up in. It's not 1973.

I was raised in Brooklyn, and I lived there for 59 years.

Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.

I grew up in Midtown Manhattan.

I used to live on Riverside Park in New York, on the Upper West Side.

I grew up in Queens, which is the most diverse borough: the rich and the poor and homeless and people of every sexual orientation and gender and age group. Everyone is saying we live in this bubble, and there's some truth to that. But I do not think it is healthy to all of a sudden invalidate the way we live in New York.

One thing about New York is you can understand how you're perceived really easily if you just get on the train, by the way people look at you.

The things I rap about are 100 percent real. But at the same time, I don't rap about those things to tear my city down. I give you the reality of what it is and what I been through and how it is living in those conditions in Gary, Ind.

New York has changed amazingly; it's gentrified everywhere, and it's a much gentler place.

I grew up in Brooklyn, in what I now know was poverty. Sharing a tiny bedroom with my two brothers, eating government cheese and passing down sneakers until they were unpassable... I simply thought the whole world lived as such, especially in pre-gentrified Williamsburg of the 1980s.